270 | Ruler Visibility, Modernity, and Ethnonationalism
being undermined in favor of the heroic figure of Bulgaria, motherland of all
Bulgars. Textual evidence drawn from songbooks and other sources points to
a direct proportional relationship between the rise of Bulgar group conscious-
ness and the emergence and evolution of negative images of the “other,” a vital
antithesis solidifying previously porous group boundaries and pointing the way
toward ethnonationalism. Thus, if millet-ism began with a state-building goal of
anchoring new ties of loyalty to the monarch, it ended with a state-rending set of
conflicting political choices and agendas. While particulars may vary from one
community to the next, the trajectory of communal consciousness studied here is
quite common. The Bulgar case was deployed merely as an illustration of impor-
tant factors at play in modern group identity formation that even postnationalist
historians of the Ottoman Empire have thus far missed. With all of the above in
mind, the bloodshed and destruction accompanying the fall of the Ottoman Em-
pire seem in no small measure the product of an ethnonational ideology, whose
relentless drive for homogeneity of one’s own group goes against the very fabric
of imperial (and human) realities.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Anagnostopoulou, Sia, and Matthias Kappler. “Bin Yaşa Padişahımız! [A Thousand
Years to Our Padishah!] The Millet-i Rum Singing the Praises of the Sultan in the
Framework of Helleno-Ottomanism.” Archivum Ottomanicum 23 (2005–2006):
47–78. This article discusses the Greek-speaking community’s sultanic songs of
praise and prayer.
Cohen, Julia Phillips. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the
Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. This book studies the Jewish
community’s embracing of Ottoman modernization policies.
Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in
the Ottoman Empire, 1876– 1909. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998. This is the classic study
of late Ottoman imperial ideology and policies.
Meeker, Michael E. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. This innovative study examines the
transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic.
Stephanov, Darin. “Sultan Mahmud II (1808–1839) and the First Shift in Modern Ruler
Visibility in the Ottoman Empire.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies As-
sociation 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 129–148. This article explores the changing notion and
practices of Ottoman sultanic power in the 1820s and 1830s.
Notes
. Stephanov, “Sultan Abdülmecid’s 1846 Tour,” 486.
. I avoid the present-day ethnonational marker “Bulgarian,” since it was not consistently
used before the creation of the Principality of Bulgaria in 1878. What had previously been a